Tar Tine Village Massacre in Sagaing Township

                   (Based on translated articles from the MYANMAR NOW in March 2023.)

Creative artwork of Myanmar Army

Myanmar Army soldiers are going extremely brutal in Sagaing Division, the area of the strongest Burmese resistance against illegal military coup, killing and raping and mutilating the local populace.

One of the worst incidents recently was in the village of Tar Tine on March 1. Nearly 70-strong Myanmar Army mobile column from the notorious 99^th Division coming along the River Irrawaddy landed at the Tar Tine Village by the confluence of Mu and Irrawaddy rivers in the early morning of March 1 and immediately raided the sleeping Burmese village.

The soldiers captured 15 villagers including the village PDF leader Kyaw Zaw and three young women. They then tortured and chopped Kyaw Zaw into multiple pieces right there in the village. They then took the rest 14 along with them and later raped and killed and mutilated all the hostages.

After gang-raping and killing the young women the soldiers even left their exposed vaginas stuffed with onions and other foreign stuff. The soldiers also chopped the heads of young men and hanged them from the road-side trees.

Shanni-Kachin War in Myanmar (Burma)

                    (Staff article from the FRONTIER MYANMAR on 20 February 2023.)

Shanni and Kachin armed groups at loggerheads: The Shanni Nationalities Army has been accused of aiding the Myanmar military since the coup, while its supporters say the group is defending against persecution by the Kachin Independence Army.

23-year-old Kyaw Zin Win lay on his back, hands tied and eyes blindfolded, as slick warm blood spread from a slash in his throat.  “Hey! Make sure you finish it. Are they all dead?” shouted a man from high above, where Kyaw Zin Win had been struck in the head and thrown from a ledge before having his throat slashed.

Still shocked to find himself alive, it was only after the soldiers left that Zaw Naing discovered he wasn’t the only survivor. “The first five people were killed, but the remaining three of us escaped with our throats cut,” he told Frontier. He alleged that the attackers were members of the Shanni Nationalities Army, an ethnic armed group that has been accused of collaborating with the Myanmar military since the 2021 coup.

Landmine Casualties Soar in Myanmar (Burma)

                   (AP article from the WASHINGTON POST on 19 February 2023.)

BANGKOK — The 3-year-old boy had taken only two steps from his mother’s lap when a deafening explosion rang out. The blast caught the woman in the face, blurring her vision. She forced her eyes open and searched for her son around the jetty where they’d been waiting for a ferry, near their small village in south-central Myanmar.

Through the smoke, she spotted him. His body lay on the ground, his feet and legs mangled with flesh peeled away, shattered bones exposed. “He was crying and telling me that it hurt so much,” she said. “He didn’t know what just happened.”

But she did. The boy had detonated a landmine, an explosive device designed to mutilate or destroy whatever comes into its path. Landmines have been banned for decades by most countries, since the U.N. Mine Ban Treaty was adopted in 1997. But in Myanmar, which isn’t party to the treaty, the use of mines has soared since the military seized power from the democratically elected government in February 2021 and armed resistance has skyrocketed.

Carnage At Hlaing Tharyar Hospital By Dr. Soe Min

           (Translated post from Dr. Soe Min’s FACEBOOK on 15 March 2021)

Yesterday, 14 March 2021, despite all the road blocks all over the city, I managed to reach the burning city Hlaing Tharyar.

I tried to call, failed miserably of course, the phone-numbers of medical facilities in the area. So I went direct to the Hlaing Tharyar Hospital and asked if I could help, of course after introducing myself as a surgeon, and they sent me direct to the emergency surgery.  

There was one wounded patient inside and another one waiting just outside the surgery to enter, and I didn’t even know how many wounded were waiting downstairs.  Right away I started operating on the one already inside. Then another one. One after another.

At just after 7 pm I finished fixing a wounded patient with large open wound on belly and mutilated insides. I could still hear the gunshots from right outside the hospital. 

Famed HIMARS Rocket-Artillery For Australia!

     (Staff article from the AUSTRALIAN DEFENCE MAGAZINE on 04 October 2022.)

The US High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) has proved one of the standout weapons of the Ukraine conflict, delivering devastating precision fires on Russian positions, including munitions depots and command posts.

Australia is set to acquire HIMARS, maybe 20 launchers, though the government has yet to give the official go-ahead. With the growing desire for greater self-sufficiency, Australia may also seek to manufacture HIMARS missiles.

James Heading, Lockheed Martin Australia director of programs, strategic capabilities office for missiles and fire control, said  there was active consideration around production of the missiles themselves, though not the launch vehicle.

Sex Ban in Medieval-Islamic Indonesia!

         (Jonathan Head’s article from the BBC NEWS UK on 08 December 2022.)

Indonesia 'sex ban': Criminal code changes threaten other freedoms: Indonesia's revised criminal code has been approved this week by parliament.

It has been branded the "Bali Bonking Ban". The revised criminal code which has been approved this week by the Indonesian parliament is getting the kind of publicity rarely given to arcane changes in another country's legal system.

Headlines around the world are warning tourists visiting Indonesia that they face up to a year in jail if caught having sex or cohabiting with someone they are not married to. Suddenly a country usually lauded as a pluralistic Muslim democracy finds itself being accused of mediaeval moral meddling.

Millions Infected & 10,000+ A Day Dying In China!

                             (Staff article from the NEWS.COM.AU on 24 December 2022.)

China Covid-19 outbreak is the ‘largest the world has ever seen’: China’s top health authority has confirmed the country’s current outbreak is, by far, the largest the world has ever seen.

Dozens of body bags piled up at a Chongqing funeral parlour, a video released on Thursday (December 22) showed, even as China continued to report no new COVID-19 deaths. Authorities have narrowed the criteria for COVID deaths, prompting criticism from many disease experts.

Near 37 million people in China were estimated to have been infected with Covid-19 on a single day this week, according to minutes from a meeting of the country’s National Health Commission, Bloomberg reported.

The First Miracle by Jeffrey Archer (1980)

         (Jeffery Archer's famous children story of the very first Christmas Eve in Year Zero.)

Tomorrow it would be A.D. 1, but nobody had told him. If anyone had, he wouldn’t have understood, because he thought it was the forty-third year of the reign of the emperor. And in any case, he had more important things on his mind.

His mother was still angry with him, and he had to admit that he’d been naughty that day, even by the standards of a normal thirteen-year-old. He hadn’t meant to drop the pitcher when she had sent him to the well for water. He had tried to explain to her that it wasn’t his fault he had tripped over a stone—that bit at least was true. What he hadn’t told her was that he had been chasing a stray dog at the time. And then there was that pomegranate: How was he to know that it was the last one, and that his father had taken a liking to them?

The young Roman was now dreading his father’s return and the possibility that he might be given another leathering. He could still recall the last one: He hadn’t been able to sit down for two days without being reminded of the pain, and the thin red scars hadn’t completely disappeared for three weeks.

He sat on the window ledge in a shaded corner of his room, trying to think of some way he could redeem himself in his mother’s eyes. He had spilled cooking oil all over his tunic and she had thrown him out of the kitchen. “Go and play outside,” she had snapped, but playing outside wasn’t much fun if you were only allowed to play by yourself. Pater had forbidden him to mix with the local boys.

Reliving 1973 Kachin Christmas Eve in New York City

 (Re-post of my "Reliving 1973 Kachin Christmas Eve in New York City" from 2011.)

New York City's Skyline.

The Big Apple or the New York City is a wholesomely overwhelming town for a simple jungle boy like me. Especially the enormous Romanesque facades of century old skyscrapers. And it hurts my neck so much that I’ve stopped trying to look up at their distinctive tops.

Like many other wide-eyed tourists from the Australian fringe of the mighty empire of USA I ended up wandering on the wide avenues leading to the Times Square brightly lit and filled to the rims by the excited crowd on the Christmas Eve.

I walked and walked and walked aimlessly on the near-zero freezing but still unbelievably crowded Fifth Avenue and ended up, fortunately of course as I wasn’t really looking for it, right in front of a beautifully grand Gothic-revival church. I walked in and realized this is the historic St.Patrick’s Cathedral   and the traditional Midnight Mass was just a few hours away.